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Med-trump writes "Alberta's $60 million carbon-cutting program is failing, according to the latest report from the Canadian province's auditor-general, Merwan Saher. A news article in Nature adds: 'the province, despite earlier warnings, has not improved its regulatory structure — and calls the emissions estimates and the offsets themselves into question.'"

Oh, we'll run out of fossil fuels but it won't be for a long time yet. Canada and the US both contain so much oil in the form of tar sands and oil shale that they could become the world's premier oil exporters. Techniques for extracting these reserves are being developed that would not require strip mining so you wouldn't even know there was an oil operation going on. Sorry, but the age of oil is not over yet unless you can find another source of energy and methods of storage and transportation that are as cheap, convenient and energy dense as plain old oil, gasoline or other hydrocarbon fuels.

"Techniques for extracting these reserves are being developed that..."That just raises costs even more. Funny thing is, without those really really heavy subsidies fossil fuels wouldn't be so cheap as they are today. Think about it for a moment, when it was first used, the oil came from wells so close to the surface, that drilling was so simple and could be done with that "ancient" technology. Nowadays we have oil platforms, underwater pipes and transcontinental pipes, gargantuan ships travelling from one side of the globe to the other. Costs are incredibly higher now, than 100 years ago. Fossil fuels will stop being used long before we run out.

You might argue that the technology doesn't exist. Well, you might find it shocking, but people don't invent things just because they "had an idea". There has to be a need for something, before it's invented. Oil is already becoming expensive, not expensive enough to ground aircraft and force ships to switch back to steam power, but enough to make people take another look at alternatives.

oil subsidies? wtf? oil is fucking cheap. it's TAXED to a level where some other sources make seemingly sense if those are not taxed as highly.

oil price is chosen(via natural selection) so that it's cheaper than processing liquid fuel from coal - and even doing that is actually pretty cheap if you have to. you know, there's profit still in oil, profit that you could skimp on if you're the oil provider. all those technical advancements, supertankers, platforms, pipelines etc are there to make oil _cheaper_,

oil subsidies? wtf? oil is fucking cheap. it's TAXED to a level where some other sources make seemingly sense if those are not taxed as highly.

For politically incorrect sources of energy, you take all the direct costs. Then you add in the costs of regulation (never mind that they're largely already included in the price). Then you add in some amount you made up to cover conventional pollution. Then you add a bunch more to cover CO2. Then you add in the cost of any military presence you can, by logic chains strong or tenuous, connect to oil. Then you add in the cost of road congestion, lung disease, oil worker pensions, and anything else you can come up with. Then you double all this to provide a margin of error.

For politically correct sources of energy, you take the current costs (ignoring the huge direct subsidies and the fact that the providers are losing money anyway), and project them downward for technological improvement.

Next time you are standing on a road, have a look down and contemplate what you are standing on, why it is there, how it got there, and who paid for it.

Who paid for the crusades in Iraq? Who benefitted? Why? While we are at it, what is the cost of the middle east policy? Who benefits? Why?

Without even jumping into climate destruction ( although, again, who will pay for it? Who benefitted? Why? ), there is the 'other' environmental disaster - air pollution. How much does it cost? Who pays for it? Why?

Subsidy doesn't quite describe the situation; perhaps "hand out" or "graft" are closer to the mark.

Next time you are standing on a road, have a look down and contemplate what you are standing on, why it is there, how it got there, and who paid for it.

First thing that should have come to your mind is that the road works just as well for biofuel-burning or electric vehicles as it does for fossil fuel-burning vehicles, that is, it doesn't force a choice of fuel. So it is disingenuous to claim it is merely a subsidy for fossil fuels. Especially when you consider that a considerable tax on gasoline exists in the developed world.

The "crusades" in Iraq? While a lot has been spent on them, most of the money hasn't had much to do with securing oil and more to

I'm standing on a road.It's made of asphalt, largely a petroleum productIt was built to facilitate the movement of people and goods from point A to point BIt was paid for by the taxpayers who wanted it and who's lives would be a lot harder without it.

It is just silly to consider a road a subsidy, graft, or handout to a particular industry sector. Try riding your bike to get to work through miles of mud.

You seem to ignore the role of demand and scarcity; if the price of oil rises to $200/barrel, there are extraction methods that would be profitable, that are not profitable now. The technology does not "cause" the price, that is true, but in this case it only lowers the price from a very high level to one that is somewhat more tolerable -- the energy return on energy invested is not nearly as good. I assume, unless we get some really nasty climate-related bite in the ass, that we will eventually get all the oil that can be gotten, but not necessarily at anything we would call a "low" price.

And if that price exceeds the cost of alternatives for obtaining transportation (non-oil electricity + batteries; bicycles for short trips; robot-assisted taxi/carpooling), then we might leave it in the ground after all.

A price of $200 per barrel translates to a cost of something like $7 per gallon. Which would put it on par with the price of the bottle of tap water you buy when you fill up. Perspective, it's important.

We're not leaving anything in the ground until it's used up. Increasing scarcity will drive the price up, and when the price goes up to where common folk won't bear it, we'll turn over the governments that won't take it by force. That's the sort of selfish critters we are.

Now that the "Arab Spring" has installed puppet governments in most of the Middle East, America's oil problems should be settled for a good while. We should probably make friends with Brazil though, just to be safe. They've just discovered some offshore deposits that look to be huge, and they've got no use for it because they converted to alcohol years ago.

Well, for some values of "evenutally," maybe. But we still have something like two-thirds of all discovered fossil fuels left to burn, and we've not begun to investigate the arctic circle, the antarctic basin, some deeper reservoirs, methane clathrates on the ocean floors, permafrost hydrocarbons, limestone catalysis, and some other things I forget. The future is quite far, but I'm OK with that. I kind of like our CO2 blanket and the end of the glaciation cycle it means to me.

Well, for some values of "evenutally," maybe. But we still have something like two-thirds of all discovered fossil fuels left to burn, and we've not begun to investigate the arctic circle, the antarctic basin, some deeper reservoirs, methane clathrates on the ocean floors, permafrost hydrocarbons, limestone catalysis, and some other things I forget.

I was curious about this a while back and one of my wife's uncles worked in the oil industry for years as a geologist so I asked him shortly after he retired, about 10 year ago. At that time I got the following numbers as the best estimates of the total oil that the world held:
6 trillion barrels as the estimated total oil the world ever held
4 trillion barrels as the maximum recoverable amount of oil at any cost
3 trillion barrels as the actual recoverable amount of oil at a profit
1 trillion barrels as the total so far consumed of the initial 6 trillion, thus 2 trillion are still recoverable at a profit

These number may vary but seem to be reasonable based off of things I have read in other sources

There's only 20 years of fossil fuel left in the ground. At least, that's what we were told in the '70s, the 80's, and the 90's. With oil usage increasing as much as it has been lately, mostly because of China, I'd guess that we're now down to 20 years left.

It's not a substitute. Oil products are incredibly convenient. They concentrate energy into a small space (compare energy density for jet fule with Li batteries one day) doen't spontaneously burn (compare with hydrogen) but it burn easily when you want it to (compare with coal / wood etc).

However, oil is even more valuable as the base material for things such as plastics. Burning it is a true sin and our descendants are likely going to hate us for it.

To make solar panels a direct oil substitute, fundamentally we need processes for turning electricity (+CO2 from the atmosphere and H from water) into hydrocarbons. These do exist, but most are in early research stages and/or quite inefficient. Getting them going at large scale, together with much cheaper solar panels would be great.

However, oil is even more valuable as the base material for things such as plastics. Burning it is a true sin and our descendants are likely going to hate us for it.

It is very likely I may be wrong but I thought that when oil is refined a certain amount can be turned into gasoline, a certain amount into diesel, a certain amount into plastic and so on. I didn't think you could use the hydrocarbons that make up gasoline to make plastic and vise versa.

You can do a fractional distillation on crude and separate it into it's various types, tar, diesel, octane, propane, etc. You can also take long chains and "crack" them (break the chains) and create more of whatever you want, as long as it has a smaller chain.

Most refineries crack now and can get up to 50% octane from a barrel of oil. Without cracking it is less than 10%.

Can't emphasize this enough. For example, if you need the elements carbon and hydrogen (basic building blocks of hydrocarbon chemistry) and you have a vast amount of cheap electricity available, then you can pull both from atmosphere. Electrolysis gets you water and heating wood in a reducing atmosphere (the trees which you can light up with LEDs) gets you carbon. Running hot hydrogen over carbon gets you methane. I don't know electricity-based tricks for going from methane to ethene (but they're there), but the latter is apparently the building block for most plastics.

Solar panels in orbit work great for powering the electronics of the satellite they're attached to. They're not ever going to be efficient for delivering ground-based power because the energy required to lift them to orbit is something like billions x the power they could provide over their lifetime.

It's not much of a surprise. Kyoto was designed (intentionally or not) as a subsidy that would allow business as usual while just writing a check to Eastern Europe. The baseline CO2 levels were set at 1990 levels, which was right before the collapse of the USSR and the resultant massive decrease in their CO2 output levels. (Likewise, our CO2 production has decreased since 2007 since our economy has tanked.)

The various carbon markets and carbon trading schemes have likewise been plagued with fraud. It comes as absolutely no surprise that Alberta's emissions trading scheme has run into identical problems.

While carbon trading schemes are admirable in their attempt to internalize external costs, in practice they're just not a very good idea.

This is why carbon offsets and caps don't work. Nobody is encouraged to stop polluting.

I don't think you get the point. A carbon market is intended to cover the externality of carbon dioxide emissions. If it does so and the market participants don't change their behavior, then that is an acceptable outcome. Behavior modification is not an indication that the system isn't working, it's rather an indication that the uses of fossil fuels or whatever are important enough to pay the additional cost.

I wouldn't classify myself as a climate change denier, but I don't believe the world as we know it can get a political fix for it. In order for the world to terraform itself(Yes, the solution is a form of terraforming, and could be useful for Mars in hundreds of years), we must get enough of the countries agreeing with each other. Right now we have problems just agreeing not to kill each other. Even some of the best governments have corruption in them too. Do we want to go,"More power to the governments!"? To me it is no surprise that the guy who rose awareness to the issue is a politician himself because it is a power grab move.

It's not much of a surprise. Kyoto was designed (intentionally or not) as a subsidy that would allow business as usual while just writing a check to Eastern Europe.

Because Eastern European countries have such great international bargaining clout? Come on. It's not a subsidy, it's not a conspiracy, it's an effort to do something good about something bad. They picked a year with a target that they thought they could hit. Obviously some places would be effected by this to a greater degree than others.

Doubtless there was some weedling and self-centered manipulation going on, so what? Whenever you have a broad and painful treaty like this there will always be someone hurting more than others - you make it as fair as you can and then you suck it up, because it has to be done regardless. My own country, the United States, pollutes far more by every metric than any of the signatories of the Kyoto treaty so we, to my chagrin, decided to take our ball and go home. Hopefully we'll step up and own to some of the problems that we've caused with the next one.

>>Because Eastern European countries have such great international bargaining clout?

That's why I said, "intentional or not"... 1990 was a terrible year to pick. The worse bit is, even the wikipedia page for Kyoto has a graph labelled "what they promised and how they are doing" with all of the countries with, quote, large percentages achieved in CO2 reduction all Eastern Bloc Countries.

In order:LatviaLithuaniaEstoniaBulgariaUkraineRomaniaPolandHungarySlovakiaRussiaCzech Repbefore getting to non-Eastern

Dirtiest source??! I'd say they'd have to work really hard to be dirtier than deep sea drilling has been.

Oil sands extraction produces massive quantities of contaminated (lead, arsenic, mercury, ammonia, naphthenic acids, and other fun things) water which is stored in tailings "ponds" (they're really more like lakes) which currently cover about 170 square kilometers.

Bullshit. The Government of Alberta's own tar sands propaganda site [alberta.ca] backs up GPs claim of 170 square kilometers of tailings ponds— that's about two Manhattans. It goes on to state that "(e)fforts continue to develop new tailings performance criteria, management technologies and practical solutions to reduce and potentially eliminate tailings ponds as we know them today." Still, tailings ponds are expected to expand to about 250 square kilometers— almost three Manhattans— by 2020.

"Alberta is the home of the tar sands... the dirtiest source of petroleum. Do you actually think they are interested in cutting carbon emissions?"

I live in Alberta, I've flown over the oil sands, and I've seen the tailing ponds. Calling it the dirtiest source of petroleum is just stupid.

If you don't think resarch is being done to reduce carbon emissions, then it's clear you haven't actually looked into the matter. All the major players are invested in it, often collaboratively. Same with research on

Like the Alberta government is going to do anything effective when almost their entire economy rides on the oil and gas industry. And like the Conservative Federal government is going to call their heartland to task.

For those that don't bother to read TFA, the one-sentence summary is that "offsets", where rather than paying the tax companies pay for credits obtained for emission-cutting programs in agriculture or in developing countries, are often dubious because the "offsets" are not properly audited and often just pay for activities that would have occurred anyway without the subsidy
This is relatively easy to fix. Just tighten up the rules on offsets. It doesn't damn emissions trading in general.

Agreed. We're supposed to reduce carbon output worldwide, and carbon trading doesn't do this. It just stops new carbon emitting economic development in poorer countries by allowing existing carbon emitting industries to emit more. I don't see how this is supposed to help reduce CO2 levels. It really is just another add on to the political bullshit machine.

On the other hand, it could force poorer countries who have already traded their carbon output away to become experts in "green" technology. Eventually th

Lax verification for carbon-offset projects has been a problem for several schemes. For the credit-creating projects to be effective at reducing overall greenhouse-gas emissions, the scheme operators are supposed to approve only projects that would otherwise not have gone ahead. The auditor-general criticized the Alberta Department of Environment and Water for allowing carbon credits for emissions-reducing activities that have become common practice.

The Alberta report found a lack of standards for how agricultural credits were verified — not one of the credits the auditors checked could be confirmed. It also pointed out that there was no standardized, accurate method for measuring the emissions from oil-sands tailing ponds, which store contaminated water, clay, sand and bitumen from oil-sands processing.

Many opponents of emissions trading programmes also argue that companies are likely to purchase carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions by adopting new technologies or changing their operating practices.

But you get more bang for the buck if you can avoid rewarding "reductions" that would have happened anyway, and use the money instead to cause reductions that would not have happened on their own. I agree that the spin -- "oh, teh incompetent government and international global warming conspiracy" -- is wrong, but it would actually be better if we could audit these a little more stringently.

Actually, the real problem with emissions is that we really do not have any way to figure out how much CO2 emissions are being done. It is all guesswork. Yes, we put up some monitors around the world, but most of them are 'downwind' of the prevailing path from LARGE emitters. So, in EU and America (the most studied), we still have mostly guesswork on cars, Ag, etc. Then to make matters really bad, you have nations like China, that cheat like mad, and prevent real measures except under very controlled circum

Actually, they do not. They only track it from nations that report it, which is likely just the western nations. In addition, the IEA is getting gross numbers, that is fossil fuel production as well as imported. They do not know exactly where it went, and for fuels, how efficiently it was used. China has some of the dirtiest coal going and does little to no cleaning. As such, it is pretty high emitters (one of the worst in fact). In addition, I believe that it keeps it quiet as to how much they actually d

Carbon offsets originated within the Reagan Administration, circa 1983, as just another scam, while today it is simply yet another extension of that overall global scam called, "shadow banking" --- easily explained by that GAO report a few years back, citing the carbon market in Europe as a colossal financial fraud scheme, doing absolutely nothing to cut down on emissions and pollution, which is exactly why that professional fraudster, Jeremy Rifkin, has been working over there pushing it for so long.

Relatively easy to fix, assuming the political will is there. But it's not. This is Alberta we're talking about. The province whose former Environment Minister said that it's not his job to protect the environment.

Some passionate NGO spokesperson comes up with a master plan to correct the problem they've achieved public passion for or recognition of, legislators pass legislation allowing a plan to be implemented. The actual implementation and regulations are then turned over to government employees. Per TFA:

"In Alberta, the Department of Environment and Water requires facilities to have their emission estimates (and offset projects) independently verified. The department also uses another set of verifiers to con

...did that read weird to you? Never mind. What happens is highly industrialised states go cap in hand to developing states and buy carbon allowance off them - basically a license to carry on polluting at the rate they are yet still meet their obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.

If properly implemented, it is a reduction, because, while the purchaser of the credit does not have to reduce their emissions, the seller of the credit does. The theory is that it really doesn't matter who reduces their emissions, as long as somebody does.

problem is, it isn't. States that sell carbon offsets can do so because they have little industrial infrastructure (for example, some of the poorer Indian states like Himachal Pradesh which either don't have significant industrial output or don't have significant fossil fuel consumption). Some weird math caps the carbon output according to population among other variables; this cap is not hit by those who sell carbon offsets to those who, if allowed to continue, would actually increase their output due to i

Seriously. They have tied the emissions to a unit of production. That is just plain stupid. It is as worthless as tying emissions to another variable of PER CAPITA. Ppl move around all the time. In addition, gov. lie (China comes quickly to the forefront, but no nation is a saint). Basically, we need emission limits tied to PER SQ KM. Period. We need a fixed value to work from. Will a few nations like Canada, Australia and Russia look better Sure. So what. That is minor in the scope of things. By putting

The only ones paying, are those that are buying products from an area. IOW, I live in Colorado. If I buy something from China, then the tax on them is presumably high (they have a large and growing CO2 emissions per sq km). Probably not the highest, but up there. So, I would have to pay 100% of the tax that increases yearly. OTH, if I buy a product from a nation like say France, and assume that EU has decided to allow nations to go individually, I would guessing that they have some lower emissions. Probab

Not really. It is politically feasible. The reality is that undeveloped nations have LOW emissions. By applying taxes on per sq km, it would hit developed nations and sloppy undeveloped nations much harder. 3rd world nations will likely love it because it allows them to compete better. Think about how much pollution China is dumping. They account for more than 50% of all mercury emissions in the world. IIRC, they should have already accounted for more than 50% of all mercury that has EVER been emitted. Ar

First, there is a maximum of CO2 which earth can process, lets call that value X. Second, there are 7 billion people on earth. Logic and principals of the enlightenment allow us to conclude that every person has the same right and therefor the same share of that CO2. In recent years that value was calculated and the result was 1.5t CO2 per person. So if everyone gets a certificate over 1.5t CO2. The problem with that. Every Chinese is already at 2.5t, European are at 10t and the US with 19.78t CO2 per pers

The primary idea is, that the people get the certificate not the state. So companies have to buy CO2 certificates from people. And as the CO2 amount of certificates is reduced every year, it will get more expensive for those polluting the most. For example, when the Chinese would increase their CO2 output they need more certificates making it for them more expensive. And in when the population growth in one country certainly that country's people get in total more certificates. However, the total number of

Here in the states, we have a number of old coal plants that are being shut down and converted to natural gas or 'cleaner coal'. For example, in Colorado, we are shutting down over 1.5 GW of coal plants from the 40's-60's, and they will be replaced by a smaller number of new high temp. natural gas plants and one shared high temp coal plant (which has the ability to convert to natural gas). In addition, since 2009, America has had growth, but most results show that emissions are still dropping. Finally, unli

Finally, the goal of 1.5t per person is a joke. The reason is that our population is still increasing and per capita has little correlation to CO2 emissions. Instead, economic output or better yet, a fixed item such as land mass, are much much better and fairer than per capita certificates.

First, I seriously doubt that is true. However, we will find out when we have OCO2 doing measurements around the globe. It will be able to see how much CO2 flows in and then out of a nation. That is actually important. Whether it is per sq km, per $ of production, or per capita, it is all tied to national boundaries. Once we have real numbers and not simple guess work, things should be quite a bit different.

You have a good point. But the good news about this tax is that it will disappear over time. The reason is that most nations will change rather than have their businesses lose ground due to other nations pouring money into changing, while they do not.

China gets about 85% of their electricity from Coal and natural gas, of which 75% is from coal. Now, China is building 1-2 NEW COAL PLANTS of.5-1GW EACH WEEK and they have said that they have ZERO intentions of stopping this for the foreseeable future. IOW, their emissions from coal will continue to get worse. In addition, they are buying new gas/diesel cars at breakneck speeds. They will not move to electric cars anytime soon because they do not have enough excess produc

Actually, electric cars cost a bit more than a gas car for a short time longer. Within 2 years, that will be a none issue. Tesla's batteries are dirt cheap and last longer compared to other cars. That is why a car that takes on $200-250K ferrari and lotus is just around 100K. Likewise, the model S at 50K has performance and styling of cars that cost around 60-70K. ANd it will continue to drop in price, not increase.

Does florida require ALL HOMES to upgrade that way? Nope. Just new ones. That is a diffe

Burning wood is carbon neutral, as the tree that produced the wood had been making that wood out of carbon it had extracted from the atmosphere in the first place. It's not the dirty Africans, nor the clean Africans, nor the people driving cars with catalytic converters. It is the people cutting down trees and not planting saplings in their place that are ruining the planet. Plants are the air purifiers of the planet. If you want to reduce CO2, start a garden.

That's an interesting claim, but it doesn't seem to hold water. Sulfur emissions are predominantly from power plants (73%), and the U.S. hasn't exported power plants to China. You could argue that exporting industry to China has effectively exported power plants to China, but as far as I understand the number of power plants in America has not fallen by 33%, thus actual reductions have been achieved and the sorry state of China's sulfur emissions are the result of China not taking any such measures. And

You know, businesses don't seem to have a problem with fines and all manner of requirements. Why not simply REQUIRE the reductions where technically possible (forget about 'cost efficiency') and update the requirements as new technology arrives.

They can and they will do it. They will scream about "lost jobs" and "cutting back" and crap like that, but it's a huge lie -- they know if they want to earn more, they have to product more. If there is additional overhead involved, they will eventually accept it

Until you require ALL nations to do this, then it will simply lead to businesses leaving a place that is fairly clean (read expensive) to places with high emissions and climbing. China is by far the worst example, but India, Brazil, etc will happily follow the path if it brings businesses their way and they have exceptions.

Then the next obvious answer becomes "tariffs and embargoes." The fact is, this is the planet we are talking about -- the only planet we have access to. We are seriously putting money before survival? We need a little more sanity.

China will stop polluting when it becomes a requirement of doing business. The EU, I have little doubt, would follow the US if such trading requirements were made. After that, you would see some amazingly fast reform occur when China's best customers won't buy from them. And

Actually, tariffs and embargoes are the WORST way to go. It will lead to nations producing inefficiently. So, by nations putting taxes on ALL GOODS, they get themselves and the foreign nations to change their habits.

As to China, it is already a requirement of doing business that they allow their money to float, stop subsidizing, stop dumping and even per the Japanese treaty, stop the heavy polluting. Yet, they simply ignore it and other nations allow it because businesses push this so that they can get

Why not simply REQUIRE the reductions where technically possible (forget about 'cost efficiency') and update the requirements as new technology arrives.

1. Because it is disconnected from the physical limits of the environment.
2. Because it would require a myriad of standards, each one of which will be twisted by it's fight with industry. (ie: it makes "divide and conquer" an obvious strategy for industry)

I'm not saying that standards enforced by law are a bad thing, I just don't think they're the best solution to such a broad problem. In the early 90's Reagan was proud to be a leading supporter of the international cap and trade treaty that is now in place for sulphur emission. As usual, economic alarmists of the day all started screaming about an economic apocalypse. The treaty was signed by most industrial nations, the economic apocalypse failed to materialise and acid rain has gone away as a major environmental problem. As you say this is how it always goes, at least it has been in the 50yrs I've been watching. Some other examples are, lead in petrol, asbestos, clean air act(s), DDT, tobacco health warnings, the list is long and the propaganda on every one of these issues from industry has been without exception utterly immoral.

International cap and trade treaties are by far the best long term solution to AGW and many other tragedies of the commons (such as overfishing)...
Cap - Because there is time dependent physical limit to the resource.
Trade - Because capitalist markets are the most efficient way to distribute a finite resource.

The size of the cap is the only detail that is rightfully determined by science, the rest of the detail is politics and accounting. Will greed and fraud occur? - Of course, it does everywhere else.

But you know, in many areas, we are ALREADY doing this. We stopped a huge amount of pollution which companies have been known for -- water, air and land. This is just another kind of pollution which needs to be controlled. It's a difficult one to be sure. But you know? There is great research being done in the area of small nuclear reactors which can go a long way to reduce the amount of carbon emitted either by using the power to capture the carbon or by using that instead of burning things.

Actually, new rules and regs isn't anything like programming. But to go with your programming analogy, by tightening constraints, you force the coders to make their code more efficient and perhaps even learn to write in assembly language to get things done instead of using inefficient canned functions.

As I said before, this method is already in use for other forms of pollution and has been wildly successful against everything from acid rain to the hole in the ozone layer, from clean water to cleaner land.

It would be much simpler for each country to tax carbon, and redistribute the revenue equally among all citizens of that country. It would give everyone an incentive to conserve, without being a hardship on anyone.

Markets work best when market failures, such as negative externalities, including carbon emissions, are corrected. If creating CO2 has a nonzero detrimental effect on the environment, then it just makes sense to internalize that cost into the price of, for example, gasoline.

Canada is the third worst CO2 emitter per capita in the world behind the US and Australia. (Surprise! China is actually quite low per capita, lower than than any EU country.) At 40M tons of CO2 per year the tar sands oil production is the single largest emitter of CO2 in the world, but even if the oil sands shut down completely, Canada would still be #3 ahead of Saudi Arabia. The sad part is that only 10% of the tar sands can be made into marketable oil by current means, the other 90% requires more energy to process, which means emitting even more CO2 per barrel. Already the process requires half the energy the oil can release to process it. Even if it reaches 100% they'll still do it if it makes money. They're going to need several nuclear power plants to keep up with production targets.

Granted, any country with long cold winters has a serious disadvantage. Air conditioning usually has to make a 15-30F difference to beat the heat, but in Canadian winters the furnace is called upon to make a 50-70F difference compared to outside temperatures. Up here, air conditioning is optional, heating is not. Many European countries employ district heating systems [wikipedia.org] to provide more fuel-efficient heat, but the lack of population density makes it less feasible in Canada to the extent seen in Scandinavia for example.

That fact remains that the air is completely horrible in China. Sure it is not a permanent or perfect solution to move pollution to china but in the short term, at least, it greatly improves our quality of life.

Localized pollution has been known for a long time. Smokestacks served no practical purpose initially, other than move pollution away from the source. So sending the pollution elsewhere is an improvement. Pollution in China does not pollute the US to the same degree pollution in the US would.

The initial purpose of a smokestack is to provide draft to the hearth, the heated flue-gasses are expanded and therefore lighter than air, so the taller the smokestack the more air is drawn through the hearth.

this is actually interesting. The entire idea of cap and trade is that a maximum is allowed if we count every business everywhere. How would cap and trade not also fall victim to this stream? Does this idiot proclamation apply to everyone who thinks this is a good idea?

'Tar sand' is the historical name, and even Britannica lists 'Bituminous sand' as an alternate name for 'tar sand'. Notice 'alternate', not a primary.

White washing, a speciality of weasels, won't disguise the travesty that mining the tar sands is. Oil sand, and every other lame euphemism the clueless promote, will be just as dirty as 'tar sand'. It isn't just sticky, like tar, to the touch.

That's a bit of a naive analysis. The government is elected by the people. I suspect that the people of Alberta are more willing to put up with extractive industries than we would like, although I'm sure they are by no means unanimously in favor of the tar sands: the main winning things in Alberta that I'm aware of are agriculture and mountains. But there's no doubt quite a bit more short term money in tar sands than in growing wheat, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to us that the Alberta governmen